Dori Smith and Tom Negrino's thoughts about technology, politics, and culture since 1999

Fix your f’ing mailing lists!

First, I’d like to say that I have the highest respect for everyone I’ve ever met who worked on any part of Apache and/or Perl.

BUT!!! Your mailing lists (bothApache’s and Perl’s) are so fucking broken as to be a danger to the Internet itself.

The problem, itself, is simple:

Stupid Windows user gets a virus.

Stupid Windows user happens to have several email addresses on his system. One is the support questions auto-responder for the 4th edition of our JavaScript book. Another is some address related to one of the above mailing lists.

Stupid Windows virus sends an email claiming that it’s to my support address, from one of the list addresses.

Support auto-responder responds just the way it’s supposed to.

Stupid broken mailing list says “Hey, this is an email to my subscription address, so I’ll go and add it to my list of subscribers!”

Joe Doe sends an email to the list, and gets back a message from my auto-responder. Repeat ad infinitum.

Hilarity ensues.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, and I’m getting really darn sick of it. And unfortunately, there’s no way for me to get off of their lists without reconfiguring my email accounts, because the support email address doesn’t actually exist and they don’t have any way of unsubbing that doesn’t require me to create a new email account.

Anyhow, the Perl-porters list is the latest one to get bit by this. My apologies to you if you’re getting email you don’t want. I don’t want your mail either. Give me a way to unsubscribe and I’ll be off in a hot second.

Or do everyone a favor and simply require the word “subscribe” in either the body or the subject line of the email. Lots of really good email servers already have this capability; you might want to look into it. Because the chances are good that I’m not the only person this has happened to.

The problem is that it isn’t just another virus. I can handle those.
The problems are that (1) I’m now subscribed to their lists, don’t want that email, and can’t unsub, and (2) every email anyone sends to the list gets an auto-response message from the support auto-responder–which I expect they don’t want, either. And it’s not going to stop until the list moms either figure out how to (gasp) allow someone to unsub via either a mail or web interface, or they remove me by hand.

Basically, no subscription mechanism should ever allow a single opt-in subscription. It shouldn’t be an option. I never, ever set up opt-in-once lists because then you have this precise problem. There’s a tiny tiny additional load in building a system that can be confirmed via email or the Web after an initial subscription request. This tiny additional load (which took me a couple hours to build as part of a self-built list server I wrote a few months ago that’s running great) saves hundreds of hours and lots of aggravation for the list operator later — and saves being blacklisted.
So I’m not sure why people don’t do it. Upfront laziness, I guess.

Your auto-responder would likely have had to include a special code in the subject line or body of the message, though, at least if the mailing list confirmation procedure is properly designed. If your auto-responder is replying with a subject line based on the original subject line, or including a quoted copy of the original body text, make it stop and this problem probably will go away. Another way to fix it would be to have the responder’s From address not be the same as the address people send mail to in order to reach it; most mailing lists require the confirmation to come from the address that originally made the request.

at least if the mailing list confirmation procedure is properly designed.
That’s the big “if” there. Nope, it doesn’t require anything specific whatsoever, just an email, any email, coming back from the recipient. Subject doesn’t matter, body content doesn’t matter, nothing.
I’m leery of changing the “from” of the auto-responding email, because I figure that people think that if they send email to an address, the return message will come from that address, and my first responsibility has to be to real support questions from real readers. Not to mention that I’m really not sure how to do this technically, and not to mention that I doubt that this would change how their brain-dead list servers “work,” anyhow.

A note for future reference: sometime in the last few days, I magically stopped getting email from these lists. Either it’s all being auto-dumped by SpamAssassin, or someone read this, got a clue, and had me unsubbed. If it’s the latter, thanks! And if this rant leads to someone implementing better procedures for the future, yay!

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